Three Democratic challengers aim to unseat longtime State’s Attorney John McCarthy.
“There’s a disconnect between what the community wants and the status quo,” says Bernice Mireku-North — a lawyer in private practice and a former line prosecutor in nearby Anne Arundel County — who is seeking to unseat McCarthy.
McCarthy calls the assertions nonsense, saying he has led Maryland’s prosecutors in reforms since taking office. And he says their views reflect a limited understanding of what voters want during times of rising gun violence. McCarthy, 70, taught high school briefly after college, took night classes at the University of Baltimore, and eventually joined the Montgomery County State’s Attorney’s Office in 1982. He rose through the office, handled a number of high-profile murder cases, and in 2006 sought to lead the office — an elected post in Maryland.
Of the three challengers, DeGonia, 51, has proposed a detailed structural shift for the office. He would decentralize operations in favor of “community-based prosecution” by placing prosecutors in each of the county’s six police district stations. That approach, DeGonia says, would allow prosecutors to better inform police officers of reform measures, get prosecutors engaged earlier in their cases, and enable crime victims to know who was handling their cases.
He says that under McCarthy, the State’s Attorney’s Office has no way to track if minority defendants are treated differently along the many steps of the criminal justice system: How they are charged; how often they’re given a chance at diversion and treatment programs designed to avoid jail; what kind of plea deals they’re offered; and if convicted, what kinds of sentences are imposed.
McCarthy said he agreed with many of the report’s findings while noting the report detailed how complicated data collection can be in the criminal justice system. Demographic information about defendants comes in from different sources — police, jails, courts, his office — and cannot be synthesized on software systems designed years ago to manage cases and not parse out such data.
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